Film Plot Summary

The film opened before the credits with a quote from the Biblical book of Job IV: 13-14:

"When deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake."

Under the credits, a child's hand made a colored chalk drawing of a two-story house on gray concrete. As the camera pulled away, it revealed a young girl (Kristen Clayton) [later introduced as the teenaged character of Alice Johnson] in a white dress. She was drawing on a sidewalk on a residential street - Elm Street, in front of the ruined remains of Nancy Thompson's (Freddy's) house.

A blonde teenager named Kristen Parker (Tuesday Knight, previously portrayed in the third film by Patricia Arquette) walked toward her and asked: "Do you live here?...Where's Freddy?" The young girl answered, giggling: "He's not home" - although she had drawn an image of serial killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in one of the windows of the chalk drawing.

A sudden rainstorm (with darkness) washed away the colored chalk, blending the colors into a bloody red mess, and the little girl disappeared. Kristen turned toward a squeaking noise - the front door of the house opening, and was drawn to it. Turning around to view the sidewalk in front of the house from the inside of the house, she saw a group of children in white clothing skipping rope and singing the "Freddy" rhyme: "One, two, Freddy's coming for you, Three, four, better lock your door..." When she tried to flee outside, she found herself trapped inside the locked, dilapidated house with a duplicate entrance hallway. She saw a shadow of a hand on the wall (a reflection of a tree branch), when a blast of thunder tossed her across the room.

She was transported into Freddy's boiler room, with dripping water and heavy rusted chain links hanging from the ceiling. Hearing a scraping noise (metal against metal), she cried out: "Joey! Kincaid! Help me!"

[Note: Kristen, Kincaid and Joey were the last three surviving Elm Street characters from Dream Warriors, the previous film.]

• Roland Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) jerked awake from "beauty sleep" in his bedroom, flew backwards from his chair through a wall, and tumbled through a large pipe - landing at Kristen's feet in her dreamworld. He yelled at her: "Aw, s--t, Kristen, not again!" He told her: "You are one spooked chick!"
• Kristen also pulled Joey Crusel (Rodney Eastman) into her dream.

She told the two boys: "It's Freddy, he's here. I heard him." Kincaid differed with her: "Freddy is dead - buried and consecrated. We won - remember?" She was worried Freddy had come back for them. Joey tried to prove to her that Freddy was "history" - he showed her that the pipes, furnace and boiler were cold. Suddenly, Kincaid's dog Jason lept through the furnace opening and grabbed Kristen's arm - and then all three individuals woke up in their respective bedrooms. Kristen's arm was bloodied by the dog bite, and she wrapped the wound.

The next day, Kristen drove in her VW convertible to a neighbor's house - the Johnsons, where she picked up two Springwood High School friends:

• bright but meek daydreamer Alice (Lisa Wilcox)
• Alice's brother Rick (Andras Jones), Kristen's boyfriend

There were other student teens in the school parking lot:

• attractive, spunky, athletic, and tough Debbie Stevens (Brooke Theiss), fearful of bugs
• "major league hunk" Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel), who attracted the eye of Debbie
• nerdy, brainy Sheila Kopecky (Toy Newkirk), suffering from asthma, and driving up on her Vespa

At her locker, Kristen was confronted by Joey and Kincaid who reprimanded her for bringing them into her dreams, from their normal lives: "You got this freako talent to bring folks into your dreams, but we don't need it anymore. Time to start living like regular people." They were worried that she might stir up Freddy again: "We all have better things to dream about."

In a short scene at the Johnson home, Rick practiced martial arts kickboxing and spins in the garage, while Alice was in the kitchen. Both were waiting for their alcoholic father Dennis (Nicholas Mele) who was late to return from work. When he sat down for dinner and complained about the food, Alice experienced a daydream of angrily responding to him: "I can think of how sick I am of watching you drink your life away and taking it out on me."

In his bedroom, Kincaid fell asleep, and began to suffer from his own lethal nightmare (the dream was a continuation of the conclusion of the previous film):

• He awakened and found himself locked in the trunk of a wrecked car in a salvage junkyard. [In the previous film, Freddy Krueger's bones were buried in a grave at the Penny Bros. Auto Salvage yard, presumably killing him after holy water was poured on his gravesite.] Kincaid kicked his way out, then pondered: "This ain't my dreamland. KRISTEN! If you're here, I'm gonna pound your ass." He jumped down to the ground, then saw his dog Jason (pulled into his dream by his dream power) digging furiously in the dirt and growling at him. When the dog lifted its leg, a flammable stream of fiery piss came out, presumably washing away holy water above Freddy's grave and causing the earth to rumble and crack open underneath. Molten lava and a hellish orangish-red light emanated from the widening and deepening fissure.
• Inside the smoldering pit or grave, scattered skeletal bones fused together, regenerating into the form of a fleshly body (with cartilage, muscle, and tissue). Burned skin and clothes covered the flesh - exhibiting the rebirth of the notorious serial killer with a bladed-fingered hand and a fedora - Freddy Krueger.
• As Kincaid fled into the maze of stacks of junker cars, Freddy threatened: "You shouldn't have buried me. I'm not dead." Kincaid pushed one of the cars off the top of a pile onto the resurrected Freddy, crushing or squashing him, celebrating: "Take that, motherf--ker!", but his victory was short-lived. The wrecked cars around him were activated -- headlights glared, engines started, windshields shattered, sparks ignited, horns honked, etc., as he began to be trapped and cornered - boxed in by the vehicles. The camera pulled back from where he was surrounded, as he yelled out a warning: "Kristen, Freddy's back."
• Freddy jammed his razor-blade-knifed fingers into Kincaid's chest, who died exclaiming: "I'll see you in hell." Freddy responded as he laughed maniacally: "Tell 'em Freddy sent ya. One down, two to go." Kincaid grabbed his lower chest in agony as he awoke in his bedroom - and expired (# 1 death).

In the next scene, Kristen was in her bedroom when she became startled, at the moment of Kincaid's death, by a tinkling noise from her wind-chime mobile at her open window.

In Joey's bedroom (where he had a "Sweet Dreams" poster of a bikinied Pin Up Girl (Hope Marie Carlton) above his TV), he was stretched out on his waterbed watching MTV (with headphones plugged into his stereo) and also reading Rolling Stone Magazine. As his eyes shut, he entered deadly dreamland:

• Joey's bed began to undulate and rock back and forth in waves - he pulled away the comforter cover, revealing the poster's Pin-Up Girl, who had vanished from the poster. She was naked and swimming underneath him inside the waterbed, pressing her hands against the plastic vinyl and gesturing to him. When she disappeared and he called out excitedly: "Wait!", Freddy burst out of the bed, grabbed him by the neck, taunted: "How's this for a wet dream?", and pulled him under the surface of the water and struggled to drown him. He called out: "Kristen, help!" as he was repeatedly pushed underwater, stabbed, and eventually murdered (# 2 death). [In a subsequent scene shortly later, his mother screamed when she discovered his drowned body inside the transparent waterbed after she pulled back the comforter cover.]

In her bedroom, Alice fed the pet fish in her aquarium tank, and then spoke to her brother Rick, who mentioned that her vanity mirror wasn't serving much of a purpose since it was covered with a collage of photographs of friends from happier times. She wasn't interested in seeing her reflection. They spoke about their alcoholic, single father's treatment of them, and he offered her advice: to stand up for herself and fight back. He taught her how to kick, part of his own martial arts routine.

The next day at school, Kristen anxiously spoke to Alice about her concern over her missing friends, Joey and Kincaid. They spoke about how they both experienced nightmares. Kristen said that she hated dreaming, although Alison disagreed: "I love to dream. I just hate the ones about my dad." Considering herself an expert on daydreaming, Alice explained how she handled or controlled her nightmares, something taught to her by her mother when she was little: "Did you ever hear of the dream master?...It's a rhyme. Just have to dream about someplace fun. Remember, you're in control."

In her next class, Kristen cried out that Freddy had killed Joey and Kincaid when she saw their empty seats. When her boyfriend Rick tried to calm her down, she lost her balance and struck her head against the classroom wall - and was knocked unconscious. Kristen entered a dream state:

• In the school infirmary, an LVN nurse (Freddy in drag) administered smelling salts to revive her, although Kristen sat up with an urgent request: "I gotta get out of here." She pleaded: "You don't get it. He's after me." As the dream-nurse turned away, blood began to soak through the back of her white uniform, causing a terrified Kristen to scream when Freddy turned back and threatened: "I wanna draw some blood."

Suddenly, Kristen was awakened again by the real-world nurse (Joanna Lipari), who asked: "Feeling better now?"

After school, some of the teens (including cute Dan Jordan) ate at a local diner, named CRAVE INN [a reference/homage to the series' creator Wes Craven], where both Debbie and Alice worked as waitresses. With Kristen, Rick burst in to tell his sister Alice that Joey and Kincaid died the previous night. Kristen blamed herself for letting Freddy kill them: "And after all we've been through together, how could I let him get to them? We were a team. I'm gonna get that son of a bitch...before it's too late."

Rick, Dan, Alice, and Kristen drove to the boarded up, run-down Elm Street "haunted" house, where Kristen told them it was Freddy's "home" -- "He's waiting in there for me to dream." She further explained: "This isn't a normal nightmare. I'm history." Rick explained the legend of Freddy to Dan:

"He's a town legend. He was a child killer freed on a technicality...So, a lot of parents got pissed off and, according to Kris, they hunted him down and roasted him like a Thanksgiving turkey...She says that he comes back in dreams. And if he kills you in your dream, you're dead for real."

Alice remembered the first part of the dream master rhyme and told Kristen about how one can control one's own dreams: "Now I lay me down to sleep. The master of dreams, my soul I'll keep." Across the street, Kristen's mother Elaine (Brooke Bundy) honked her car horn and ordered her daughter to get away from the house. As the other teens left the house, Alice momentarily saw the chalk drawing of the house on the sidewalk.

At dinner that night, Kristen's mother secretly put a sedative in her distraught daughter's drink to force her to sleep. Realizing she had been drugged, an angry Kristen was aware that her mother was one of the parents who years earlier had "torched" Fred Krueger - and now the reincarnated killer was after her: "In case you haven't been keeping score, it's his f--king banquet and I'm the last course." She was accusatory toward her mother: "You just murdered me. Take that to your god-damned therapy." She staggered disorientedly up the stairs to her bedroom, and attempted to call Alice, but fell down. As she drifted off and her eyes shut, Kristen told herself: "Dream someplace fun" - words of advice she had heard from Alice. During Kristen's dream:

• She peacefully awoke on a deserted lakefront beach, sunbathing, lying on a towel and wearing a colorful bikini. She saw a young girl named Alice (the same girl making a chalk drawing in the film's opening) building a sand castle near by. A shark fin-like object, Freddy's four-bladed gloved hand that was slightly on fire, sliced through the surface of the water, headed for shore, and cut through the sand toward the castle. When it crashed into the sand structure, it caused it to blow up - and Freddy appeared in the cloud of sand.
• As she ran, Kristen fell into quicksand on the beach and began to sink - Freddy approached her, put on sunglasses, and pushed her under the surface of the sand with his foot, while laughing maniacally.
• Kristen emerged through a jagged hole in the ceiling of the Thompson's Elm Street dining room, desperately holding on, and then crawling down the wall in the apparently upside-down room. She ran down the cellar stairs into the boiler room filled with catwalks, pipes, and steam, where Freddy was waiting for her: "Elm Street's last brat. Farewell" - she defiantly answered him: "We beat you before," but Freddy was unphased: "And now you're all alone."
• Kristen refused to call on her dreaming friend Alice to help, asserting: "Never! I'm the last." However, she helplessly and inadvertently called out for Alice, who suddenly appeared in her nightmare -- barefooted in the boiler room, causing Freddy to notice: "How sweet. Fresh meat!" Kristen shook her friend by the shoulders to warn her: "Alice, wake up and get out" and then slapped Alice hard across the face, but immediately apologized: "Alice, I'm so sorry, it was a mistake. I pulled you in."
• Kristen charged at Freddy, threatening: "Leave her alone, you son of a bitch!" Freddy threw Kristen over his shoulder into a burning sea of flames, crying: "Now no one sleeps." As she was burning alive, Freddy ripped open his shirt, displaying the tortured, pulsating faces of the souls of his previous victims on his fire-scarred chest. As Kristen was dying, she sent a blast of her power and energy toward Alice: "You'll need my power," she exclaimed, slamming her bolt of energy first into Freddy and passing through him, causing him to contort in pain.
• The bolt of life power continued onto Alice - granting her the power to pull people into dreams, and giving her part of Kristen's personality.

Alice immediately awakened and bolted upright in her own bed. She noticed that a picture on her mirror's collage was of Freddy holding Kristen in his arms in the boiler room, with the caption: "Greetings From Hell!" As she removed and held the photograph, it caught fire. She sensed that Kristen was in danger, and hurried with her brother Rick to Kristen's two-story brick house. From outside the home, they saw that her upstairs bedroom was on fire, but were too late to save her from a fiery death (# 3 death).

At the cemetery, the camera panned past two new gravestones: Roland Kincaid and Kristen Parker [behind them were grave markers for Nancy Thompson and Donald Thompson, deceased characters from previous installments]. Following Kristen's death, Alice insisted to Rick that her horrible fate was no accident, or suicide, and that it couldn't be prevented: "I saw it happen in my dream. There was this horrible man...I could smell the smoke. I could feel the heat from the fire. It wasn't a dream." She admitted that she felt "different" - "Something happened in the dream. And now it's like part of her is with me." And at school, Alice began to adopt some of Kristen's behaviors and sayings; for instance, she noticed exhausted Sheila's 'bags' under her eyes (as Kristen had said to her earlier): "We have matching luggage...You didn't sleep last night?" She also lit a cigarette, as Kristen often did, although she was a non-smoker.

During a physics class exam, Alice was sleeping and dreaming. Seated next to her was Sheila, who was accidentally pulled into Alice's nightmare:

• The formulas or equations on Sheila's paper rotated around on the page. Bold black-ink letters on Sheila's page formed to spell: "Learning is Fun with Freddy!" Blood dripped from Sheila's pen.

Alice 'awoke' and noticed Sheila having trouble during their shared nightmare:

• When Sheila smeared the red ink into her paper to try to clean it up, her hand plunged into her desk, and then when her hand was released, a mechanical, robotic claw-like hand burst from the hole in her desk and grabbed her face. Nearby, Alice screamed and struggled to get out of her desk-chair, but was restrained and trapped there and couldn't move. Sheila screamed: "Help me!" but none of the other calm students noticed, except Alice.
• Freddy sat at the teacher's desk, peeling an apple with one of his claws. He removed his fedora and approached toward Sheila - he stroked her lips, removed her glasses, wagged his demonic tongue at her, grabbed the two sides of her face, and suggested: "Wanna suck face?" He yanked her toward him, picked her up, and kissed her hard on the mouth - he literally sucked the air and life essence out of her body until she was only a mummified corpse in his hands, and then tossed her back into her chair: "You flunked!"
• Alice screamed: "Sheila, wake up!", causing her friend to wake up, although she was suffering an intense asthma attack, choking for air and dying (# 4 death).

Alice tried to convince her classmates and teacher of Freddy's presence: "Didn't you see it? He was here," although everyone looked at her strangely. As Sheila's body was taken away and her friends watched, Debbie doubted the cause of death: "What 17-year-old has fatal asthma?" Alice explained: "It was Freddy...I saw it. It was my dream. I brought Sheila in," but no one believed how she had adopted Kristen's troubling power to bring people into her dreams. Alice mourned: "I gave Sheila to him. And now she's dead."

In Alice's bedroom that night, she studied Sheila's invention - a mechanical bug-zapper. She removed a picture of the two of them on her vanity mirror, opening up more of the mirror to her own reflection. At her diner-waitress job, she told Dan (who was skeptical of her story) that she was working double-shifts because she couldn't sleep and hadn't slept in a few days. She feared: "Someone might die." He asked why Freddy was after her -- she answered:

"Kristen was the last child left of the people who killed Freddy. Maybe Freddy can't get to the new kids unless there's someone to bring them to him."

The next day in the school locker-room during practice, Rick told Dan that Alice blamed herself for the death of Sheila, and then admitted his own guilt about Kristen's death: "Maybe I could have stopped it if I'd have listened." He explained that due to the town's history, "it's not exactly a safe place to be a teenager."

In a classroom, Alice and fellow students were lectured on dream philosophy by their teacher (Robert Shaye, New Line Cinema CEO and series producer):

"Every society, dating back to the ancients has had theories regarding dreams. What they mean, how to control them. Aristotle believed that during sleep your soul roams free. What it sees are dreams. The skilled dreamers - they're able to control what they see. There is, in fact, a myth that there's two gates your soul can enter. One is a positive gate, the other a negative gate. The key element is that there's a dream master - someone who guards the positive gate and, in fact, protects the sleeping host..."

Alice struggled to stay awake during the droning, monotone lecture, but dozed off. In another area of the school, in the locker room's toilet stall, Rick also nodded off, and his dream became deadly:

• In Rick's dream, a group of cheerleaders with pom-poms invaded the toilet stall-cubicle, including Alice. He then found himself in an out-of-control moving elevator "going down." When the doors opened, he was in an opulent, open-air Oriental dojo (a formal training area) and dressed in his martial-arts outfit. He heard Freddy's voice imitating a ninja: "A true warrior needs no eyes" and then was struck a few times by the invisible Freddy, while taunted: "Ninja warriors have calm. Find your balance, Rick!"
• Rick dared Krueger to show himself and pummeled the air with his fists and kicks, causing Freddy's gloved hand to become visible and fall to the floor. He cried out: "Banzai. How you gonna fight me without your weapon, Freddy?" As Freddy yelled: "Sayonara, Rick-san!," the disembodied gloved hand flew through the air and impaled itself in Rick's chest (# 5 death).

At the moment of Rick's death, Alice was jolted awake in the classroom. She pounded her fist into her desktop, and loudly screamed: "Nooo!", causing the windows to violently shatter.

At Rick's funeral, Alice (clutching her brother's oriental bandana in her hand) had a day-dream hallucination:

• Rick opened up his coffin lid, smiled, and said: "Hello, baby!" He strolled over to Alice, telling her: "They think I'm dead, don't they?...I'm here. It was a big joke to fool Freddy. Come on, smile for me." She dismissed her daydream, and Rick returned to the coffin.

Afterwards, Alice told Dan: "I guess this is my own war." She told Debbie that Freddy wasn't a "night-stalker," and that it would take "more than bench presses to beat him." Alice vowed to devise a plan with her friends that night to defeat Freddy: "Mind over matter." [Alice was acquiring the abilities, powers, sayings, and talents of those who were murdered by Freddy, and was planning to use them against him.] Debbie recalled: "Sheila used to say that. God, every day, she changes." Dan corrected her - "It's after every death."

In her bedroom, Alice again removed a picture of Rick from her vanity mirror, revealing more of her own reflection in the open space of the mirror. She hung Rick's oriental bandana on the mirror next to Sheila's gadget, and then practiced with Rick's nun-chuck sticks, surprising herself with her newfound ability: "What's happening to me?" Her drunken father prohibited her from leaving the house ("I don't want to lose you. We're all we have") to meet her friends, and she was unable to rendezvous as planned.

Outside the diner, Dan waited for Alice, musing: "All the towns in America and I gotta move to the Bermuda Triangle." Alice fell asleep in her bedroom, and experienced an hallucinatory dream, set in the movie theatre and diner:

• Alice dreamed that she eventually snuck away from her house (she climbed onto her roof and dropped down, as Rick had done earlier), although she found that Dan had already left the diner.
• She approached the marquee of the local Rialto movie theatre, showing "Reefer Madness" - advertised as 'Lost Burning Youth'. [One of the posters momentarily viewed at the entrance to the theatre was for director Renny Harlin's previous film Prison (1988).] She sat in the balcony, with popcorn and a drink in her lap.
• Suddenly, the projected old black and white film on the screen changed - the camera zoomed back from a jukebox, now located in a rundown, dilapidated version of the Crave Inn, forgotten and crumbling with tumbleweeds blowing by. The wind carried over into the movie-theatre, blowing her refreshments out of her hands. She attempted to hold on to the edge of the balcony, but the hurricane-force winds blew her across the auditorium into the screen - and into the film itself, depositing her in front of the diner.
• She entered inside the diner, where the doors shut behind her, and she was waited upon at the counter by the sole waitress - a gray-haired, withered zombie-like version of herself. Alice was startled when Freddy appeared next to her, joking: "If the food don't kill ya, the service will." They were served a large-sized pepperoni death-pizza - the pepperonis were the miniature, screaming faces of Freddy's victims, including her friends, crying out to her: "No, Alice, don't let him do it." Before dining by spearing one of the heads with a bladed finger, Freddy counted: "Eeney, Meeney, Miney...MOE!" and then chose to eat Rick's head: "You little meatball. I love soul food."
• Freddy grabbed Alice by the back of the neck and ordered: "Bring me more." He then threatened: "Your shift is over."

Alice jerked awake in her bedroom and sat up, realizing she had to save Debbie before Freddy got to her. Debbie was Freddy's next prospective victim, who was working out with bench-pressing weights in her attic, and presumably dozed off.

Again, Alice ran to the diner where she met Dan, and they drove together to Debbie's place. However, as she raced to Debbie's house, she was at first unaware that their movements were controlled by Freddy, who had trapped them in a repeating, circular deja-vu time-loop. They were delayed because they had to repeat their same actions three times - they were back at the diner again where they had started.

Meanwhile, Debbie's nightmare led to her crushing death:

• Freddy's reflection was visible in the shiny end of one of Debbie's steel weights as she bench-pressed. He stood above her and grabbed the bar next to her hands, as she vowed: "I don't believe in you." He replied: "I believe in you." He pressed the bar down toward Debbie's throat, quipping: "No pain no gain." Her elbows cracked and split, exposing flesh and bone under the skin. She screamed as her forearms fell limply in front of her, and then insect-like claws emerged from the broken skin - her own greatest fear! Her human arms dropped to the floor, as cockroach appendages grew from her sides.
• Debbie found herself trapped inside a 'roach-motel' cardboard box where her feet stuck to the gooey floor. When she fell face-first into the goo, she pulled back, ripping the flesh off her face to reveal her cockroach head. She watched another cockroach entrapped near her, and saw Freddy's enlarged eye peering in at her through a slit in the box. Freddy again quipped: "You can check in, but you can't check out." He then crushed the bug-trap box in his left hand, spewing her yellowish insides (# 6 death).

At the moment of Debbie's death as Dan and Alice were again driving to the house, Alice was violently jolted - she knew instinctively: "Debbie, she's gone. I've collected her, like the others."

The two were blinded by bright car lights and then saw Freddy defiantly standing in the middle of the road. Alice attempted to ram into him, but he vanished and the truck appeared to crash into an invisible wall. The truck was totaled when it crumpled from the collision, actually striking a tree across from Debbie's house.

Alice revived from the accident, realizing that Dan was seriously injured, and required hospitalization. In the paramedic ambulance, Alice refused to have Dan sedated, and then whispered to him: "Don't let them put you to sleep. We have to get ready for him." Dan was scheduled for surgery in fifteen minutes - and Alice feared she wouldn't have enough time to finally vanquish Freddy - she feared Dan would be next if he was put under: "They're gonna kill him."

As Dan was prepared for the operating table and administered gas, Alice sped off in her father's station wagon to her home where she took sleeping pills to fall asleep. Strong and confident in the mirror reflection (after removing most of the pictures and clearing her dresser), she prepared herself to battle Freddy by carrying or wearing tokens or mementos of power from her friends:

• Debbie's spike-studded bracelet
• Rick's oriental bandana
• Sheila's ultra-sound gadget

She saw herself as the 'dream master' who could harness others' abilities - reveling in her new power: "F--kin' A" (a phrase spoken earlier by Kincaid).

Under anesthesia and in a dreamworld, Dan began to hallucinate:

• Dan's surgical doctor was transformed into the menacing Freddy: "Well, it ain't Dr. Seuss," and Dan screamed out for Alice's help.
• Now sleeping, Alice heard his cries and called out to Freddy: "Get away from him, you son-of-a-bitch!' and dove feet-first into her vanity mirror, entering into Dan's dreamworld in the operating room, where she assisted him off the table - his wounds were healed in the dream.
• They ran from there into a large cylinder, where Freddy awaited them at its opening - he began to rotate the cylinder around them, spinning it as if they were in a giant kaleidoscope. They crashed through the stained glass-window at the other end of the cylinder, free-falling into an abandoned church. Dan noticed his serious injuries (a hemorrhaging chest during the operation), worrying: "Alice, it's too late."

Alice willed Dan to reawaken in the real-world by regaining consciousness, as he vanished from the dreamworld next to her. Now, she faced Freddy alone in the deserted church:

• She heard the chorus of young girls singing the "Freddy" rhyme, as Freddy entered the church: "Welcome to Wonderland, Alice." She used Rick's kick-boxing martial arts skills and her other newly-acquired powers to fight Freddy, but he was only contemptuous of her: "You've got their power, I've got their souls...I've been guarding my gate for a long time, bitch."
• In retaliation, she stabbed him in the chest with Sheila's device (attached to an electrical power cable she ripped from the wall), electrocuting him and creating a gaping hole in his mid-section, although he magically filled in the space in a matter of seconds. He bragged about his invulnerable immortality in the dreamworld: "I am eternal," smacked her across the face, and came in for the final kill.
• As he advanced toward her, Alice recalled the final verse of the dream master spell, sung-spoken by the young girls in the choir loft: "Now I lay me down to sleep, the master of dreams, my soul I'll keep. In the reflection of my mind's eye, Evil will see itself, and it shall die!" She viewed herself in the reflection of a broken piece of stained glass, and then she used the power of the spell to force Freddy to see his own internal evil - she reflected Freddy's image back to himself with the shard.
• As he screamed at the sight of his own face, the camera zoomed through his innards, tracking by all the tortured souls of the dead children and victims he had trapped there who were struggling to break free. Alice ordered the release of the imprisoned souls: "Let them out! You're dead, Krueger!" The trapped souls began to tear out of Freddy's body, their erupting arms grabbing at him and ripping him apart, and pinning him back. [For one brief moment, one soul's naked breasts (B-movie scream queen Linnea Quigley) were seen struggling under Freddy's chest.]
• Finally, Freddy's head exploded, releasing all the entrapped souls inside of him, as the stained glass shard shattered in Alice's hand. The souls swooped around and ascended to an open window, thanking Alice as they passed ("You saved us, Freedom!"), while Freddy's outer shell of clothes fell lifelessly to the floor. She delivered Freddy's epitaph: "Rest in hell," before leaving the church (Freddy's death - temporarily)

In the final scene weeks later, recovered boyfriend/girlfriend Dan and Alice were walking hand-in-hand together in a park, where they came to a fountain. She told him she still couldn't sleep very well, although she wanted to be awake for different reasons: "I have more reasons to stay awake now."

He flipped a coin into the water to make a wish - Alice saw Freddy's image briefly reflected in the ripples caused by the coin. He asked: "What'd you wish for?" She replied: "If I tell you, it won't come true" before they walked away.

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

With a production budget of $13 million, and box-office gross receipts of $49 million (domestic). This was the highest-grossing film of the entire Elm Street series, not counting Freddy vs. Jason (2003).

This was the last film in the Nightmare series to officially have a number attached to its title.

Body Count: 6 (all killed by Freddy), followed by Freddy's demise (temporary).